HOUSTON —Mother Nature, we need your help. After one day of delay due to bad weather, a college team of engineering students is hoping for better luck today (July 19) in order to fly on an acrobatic airplane ride and experiment with fire in zero gravity.

The eight-student team from the University of California, San Diego is one of seven university teams set to fly a variety of experiments on a Zero Gravity Corporation jet from Ellington Field here today as part of NASA's Microgravity University Program, which provides students with access to weightless conditions for their experiments. The UCSD Microgravity Team is led by aerospace engineering senior Sam Avery and SPACE.com has been following the group's work as its team journalist to provide a glimpse into how student science on weightless flights is performed.

Engineering students with the UCSD Microgravity Team from the University of California, San Diego, stands near their biofuel experiment to test weightless flames ahead of a NASA Microgravity University flight at Ellington Field in Houston. The are: (clockwise from left): Joshua Siu, Sam Avery, Jack Goodwin, Andrew Beeler, Daneesha Kenyon, Joshua Sullivan, Nico Montoya, and Victor Hong. NASA mentor Christina Gallegos is not pictured. Image taken on July 18, 2013.Credit: Tariq Malik/SPACE.com

Bad weather prevented the zero-gravity flight on Thursday afternoon. If the weather cooperates with NASA today, the agency will be able to squeeze in two microgravity flights to fly each university experiment twice, though with different team members. The ZERO-G flight is expected to last up to two hours and include about 32 parabolas on a Boeing 727 plane modified for the extremes of parabolic flight. The plane flies up and down to generate brief periods of weightlessness (about 30 seconds) before swinging back up to pull 2Gs (twice the force of Earth's gravity). [Photos: Zero-Gravity Science at NASA's Microgravity University]

Editor's note: You can follow the progress of today's NASA Microgravity University Program flight via the program's Twitter feed @NASA_RGEFPand by following the hashtag #DefyGravity. UCSD Microgravity Team member Nico Montoya has been posting updates about the team's work at @NicoSuave9.

Here are the college teams flying on today's flights:

The following is a list from NASA of the undergraduate teams set to ride on NASA's zero-gravity flights this week with the names of their experiments:

Baldwin Wallace University / John Carroll University: The Stability of Liquid Bridges under Varying Total Body Force

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Tariq Malik

Tariq joined Purch's Space.com team in 2001 as a staff writer, and later editor, covering human spaceflight, exploration and space science. He became Space.com's Managing Editor in 2009. Before joining Space.com, Tariq was a staff reporter for The Los Angeles Times. He is also an Eagle Scout (yes, he has the Space Exploration merit badge) and went to Space Camp four times as a kid and a fifth time as an adult. He has journalism degrees from the University of Southern California and New York University. To see his latest project, you can follow Tariq on Google+, Twitter and on Facebook.